I don't want to go until you see the light
by flowered
Summary: Starts in year5 whilst Snape tries giving Harry occlumency lessons. Thoughts are seen, things get messy.
1. Chapter 1

Salazar Slytherin had originally designed the dungeon level himself. The bulk of Hogwarts castle had been built with slate and gneiss stone, but the dungeons had been constructed with mountain granite that sparkled with a million brilliant flashes from the overhead baroque crystal candle chandelliers. Each twisting hallway melted with vivid, moving paintings of revenants and fatales, each corner buttressed with gargoyle reliefs that roared at non-slytherin. The common room itself opened with two monolithic veined marble columns on either side of the great portrait, and inside mosaic stone floors and high ceiling vaulting similiar to the Baths of Diocletian, like a hard roman paradise if Salazar had decorated on the merits of muggles (he did not). The house colors of emerald and silver were displayed lavishly with triple count silks and thick turkish velvets that the first headmaster of Durmstrang had sent by the crate for Salazar, and most of the enchantments on the level (for security or otherwise) were old magic, as old as each piece of furniture with it's turn-of-some-century engravings and that waft of old cherry wood that spoke of regency. The gilded fireplaces gave off enough fractal light that one could see dust hangling lazily in the air, and all around was the stale remnant of Somalian myrrh that enveloped the cold alabaster busts and an echo of parseltongue that undulated from long, cold shadows.

The head of house (Slytherin, in this case) had private quarters, down one corridor and on the left from the common room and dormitories, adjacent to the potions classroom. Private quarters were for a proffessor to do with as they pleased, naturally, but a majority of Severus Snapes quarters were remnants of Slytherin house heads before him. The worn leatherbound books on the shelves were about might and magic, histories of the pureblood families, restricted dark arts books and powerful spell grimoires. The bed was cherry oak with a grandured canopy of refined mulberry silk in the deepest emerald, and one lavish grey rug spread out across the stone floor, so deep that when Snape set his bare feet to it they sank out of sight. He had changed almost nothing about the quarters from the day he had first walked into them because, as with most of what Snape deemed personality (with hard misgivings), he internalized everything that he was. He had never been free: not in the shadow of his hateful muggle father, not alongside his judging Slytherin peers, not in his double life as an adult. It might have been quite sad if Snape had not lost his use for sadness long, long ago and replaced it, instead, with a disdain that ran long and deep, a bitterness that pooled like vestiges across the walls in late hours that he walked alone. His steps echo alongside that familiar snake language that twines itself with everything in the dungeons, his lifes mistakes and regrets and casualties floating close behind in whispy phantasms that only he can see or touch: a man forever haunted.

Potter waits at his door, a single point of blue wand light in the darkness (metaphor, that) - Snape is just out of it's bredth, just a foot more into the otherwise inky blackness of the halls. He pauses there momentarily. Occlumency is only one of his many talents (of course) neccessary for his survival on all accounts, but it unnerves Snape to have Harry treading this arena with him, the two of them swimming in the vasts seas of conscious and unconscious, together. And Potter, so clumsy with his mind, spilling out everywhere for all to see. So different from Snape that it makes the hardened Slytherin's disdain spike, his bile for the boy comes like a second nature, like a fifteen year old perversion of nature dolefully eyeing the painting on the walls. Snape gathers himself into his cloaks and steps forward, his lip twitching only slightly when Harry visibly startles, and moves forward. The doors to his chambers push open without a hand to help, and after Harry has followed Snape inside and the fireplaces light for the presence of their lord they slam shut with equal solemn brevity. The only great comfort in all of this is, of course, that Harry Potter is as miserable as he is. That his body gives off waves of defeated discomfort with every broad sweeping gensture that Snape makes to clear off room from a chair, from a desk, a twist of his wand and a sigh from Harry's lips.

Snape is, however, free of those charges that he has ever hated the boy. Whatever it is between he and potter, he knows, stems from great misdirection on his part and his double life and old grudges that he doesn't hold the boy accountable for but .. can't help but feel the sting of when he looks at him, all the same. It is a bit tragic that they should ever find themselves alone together in a room, Potter oblivious to all the years that had existed before him and how they had shaped Snape, and why. There is a very dreamt up, ethereal Snape that is twisted into a hunch of black robes, alone forever to die with his secrets, a singular kind of man because so few have ever gone on existing in the way that he does. Infact, if he had not felt so suffered to go on existing for this purpose, in his duty to _her_ memory, Snape might have gone ashen and blown into the wind long ago. How visible it felt, too. How much more it hurt him to know just how obvious it was that he was withered.

"Sit."

Snape whirls to resume their lessons wordlessly. He is momentarily caught off guard by Harry's wand already raised, his rigor, his features set in the most displeased, unhappy lines - not so different from the first time they had ever made eye contact in Harry's first year, there was a lopsided animosity that simply seeped from the boy that never ceased to throw Snape off everytime he had to confront it. In Snape's disquiet over Harry's seething green eyes it is Harry who again invades the potion master's mind. In gilded gold rose cages he's locked away the beautiful moments: strange, precious memories and it is then that he offers them - _why _- in some humble deliverance that everything inside of him is not ugly and ruined. The tapestries of stained glass in the Sainte Chapelle that she had wanted to show him at sunset, that light and her hand winding into his for the brevity of beauty that engulfed them. The intimate arias that unfolded on the steps of Teatro la Fenice, on a scratchy record, right next to Lily in the grass - her hair was long enough that it barely brushed his shoulder. The field behind their birthplaces where the gypsy families camped for the summer and their twine and stake curtain walls of thick damask - he had been spying on them when he'd first seen her on the other side of the plain, spying too, and the sun set behind her in amber, rose, gold as time slowed. Grimms to start the story, once upon a time, _I don't need help from a mudblood_ & the porcelain heroine shatters and the memories go inky, foggy, and Harry is back in his own mind again. There is vulnerability in the air.

Last time Harry had invaded his mind Snape had roared him out and it had taken two weeks of Dumbledore's pursuasions over tea to bring Snape back round to the lessons. Now, though, the two of them breath hard and watch one another. Harry begins to apologize but Snape's wand is up and it is his turn, his magic fueld with a passionate kind of anger. "_Legilimens!"_ Cap guns pop, Weasley fireworks fizzle, a planet burns on the horizon and then the first stars appear; a line of purple dusk steals across in a band, then it is night and Harry is in his bed in gryffindor tower holding a wrinkled copy of The Prophet staring at the scowling face of Snape in a moving photo that might have just well been a still muggle shot for all he'd moved & some tacky Rita Skeeter line about deatheaters in Hogwarts that Dumbledore had made them retract. The music of colorful bruises, swollen ankles, and sore muscles after quidditch, Harry on the bench alone, he removes that crumpled, unhappy photo torn from the prophet and stares at it. The scenes melt and twist into kaleidoscope realities, irish twined vines, pictish coiled snakes that speak softly. Harry stares over his date at the Yule Ball to watch Snape sitting gruff on the sidelines in dressrobes and there is such heartache and longing. Back in the tower, back in the tower, urgency in the memory, The wrinkled photo in one hand while the other slides down ...

"_Stop_!" Harry yells, horse and unnerved. "You've no right...just stop." He is reflected in the surrounding walls of potion bottles, Rubus Idaeus and Sarsaparilla scribbled with Snape's illegible handwriting and hundreds of angry, refracted Harry Potters all catching breath and indignant.

Snape is pale; more pale than usual, if possible. More pale than the last time when Harry had seen his father hoisting Snape up into the air and he can still feel the urgency and the longing in a way that he hasn't felt them in decades of his life, missives from Potter's world, mind and thought.

Without being asked Harry tears past Snape, knocking one of his bony elbows into several bottles that go breaking to the floor, out of the door and down the hall with Snape's face still drained of blood where he stands rigid. Outside one cathedral shaped window crows fill the sky like some vast black shattering of glass in an ill omen of things to come. Lily's ghost is a quiet heartbeat, fighting extinction, laughing and living in the tangles of time. "_Harry_," Snape whispers softly, barely understanding.


	2. Chapter 2

It had always been a great bother to Severus Snape that Harry Potter, the boy who lived, absolutely hated him (without much prompt, frankly). It bothered him in the way that many great, unsolved mysteries irritated and unnerved a soul - _why_. Initially Snape had tried to greet Potter with the neutral indifference that he greeted all first years - afterall clumsy, loud children were hardly Snape's fondest company and _by the gods_ he had to teach a new lott of them every year. But Potter had bristled to him immediatly. The thing was, the rub here, that their destiny together, Snape and Potter's, called to neccessity a certain amount of open loathing. Snape had an image to maintain, afterall. An image he so hated maintaining, at times, that it caused him to question how good a friend Albus Dumbledore could claim to be in demanding so much from Snape and so little from others (..what had Minerva ever _bloody_ done). It had seemed unfortunate to Snape that their lives had already been so determined, that he might never confide in Lily's closest bloodline that he had cared a great deal, that his heart still beat to that low, fading drum. That over the years, despite those tendencies towards his father's explosive behavior that Harry sometimes exhibited to Snape's great and dismal dismay, he was rather proud of the boy and, infact, felt his plight like only a close confidant might have. Dumbledore had entrusted in Snape the ultimate fate of Harry Potter, his final use in this game that Dumbledore had set into motion against Voldemort (or that Voldemort had set into motion against himself but that Dumbledore would see through to the end). It had caused Snape to further pull from Harry, had caused him to antagonize the boy's already wavering trust of the potion's professor. Lily Potter had died and her son would die, too, and Snape was useless to stop it's relenting march to the finish line. Every effort to help him, to save him for the precise time, only caused Snape's failures and losses to multiply like streaks against glass in a downpour of rain. He felt obliged to whisper his apologies into the air, one after another. The decades blur and bend and pass.

Snape stares listlessly at Dumbledore, who reclines casually in his chair.

"The lessons must continue, Severus, he needs your help."

"Sir, I can only do so much-"

"No, Severus, there is still much to be done. You promised, afterall."

A part of Snape wants to tear out that it isn't fair, that he never promised to be a pawn for the rest of his miserable days and that what Dumbledore asks is _over the line_, because it is, but the majority of him knows that it rests, singularly, his own fault. He is the twisted monster out of nightmares, curled and stinking and desperate (he hates himself more than anyone else ever could), who had whispered out the prophecy to Voldemort, like a rotting curse in his veins that had stained Lily Potter. His actions, however naive and unknowing, still infect what Lily had loved and will, ultimatly, be the reason Harry Potter has to die. Snape's body slumps, only slightly, signalling that age old defeat that will always give over to what Dumbledore asks.

Dumbledore smiles, something small and sad and accepting. He reaches across the desk and pats Snape lightly on the hand.

"Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light," Dumbledore murmurs.

Snape says nothing but thinks, all the same, that real hell has nothing to do with poetry and pretty words.

.

"He's been a bit off, don't you think, not even coming down for breakfast.." Ron muffles, shoving a muffin into his mouth. Hermione stares at him with all the disgust in all the worlds, until he finally looks at her, still chewing, with an admonished expression.

"Anyway, you would be a bit off, too, if you had to have occlumency lessons with Snape."

"That's right, innit?" Ron agrees, reaching for a pumpkin pastie. As if to quell the storm of Hermiones total annoyance he says, without looking at her, "I'm eating for Harry, you know, in spirit and all that."

.

Harry Potter had never been a particularly deep or thoughtful individual. If a person seemed rotten he assumed they were rotten, right down to the core. In many ways, infact, he was superficial and flat faced this way (it could be both good and bad). He had never eaten black pudding because it just _looked off_ to him, he would always forgive a friend because they were a friend (that's that) and he would probably never give a Slytherin a fair chance. Harry Potter had known that Professor Snape, as he sat at the front table during the first great feast Harry had ever attended, was no good. He had eyed Harry with a kind of mixed horror and surprise, thinly veiled, and idly twisted a lank strand of his greasy hair. When he pressed down the corridors, black robes flowing, he reminded Harry of a slinking spider - a youthful impression but one that had stuck in the way Harry had always naturally been abashed to be near him as though he was a personal phobia. It had comforted Harry, some, to make these rash generalizations about Slytherins and about their creeping, crawling head of house. It was easy, afterall, to place blame and suspicion on someone who seemed to ask for it rather than someone Harry had already foolishly trusted on merit and word (Quirrell had had to spell himself out to Harry and Harry had still tried to fit Snape into the diabolique equation of the sorcerer's stone, somewhere, and so it went every year after). Noone had ever put him to the task of examining his feelings further, or to giving fair chances - mostly because he was Harry Potter and his moral dictum wasn't oft questioned, and mostly because he was surrounded by hundreds of Gryffindor echoes that held Slytherin of low opinion. It was nothing he lost sleep over, anyway. Or _hadn't_. Not until his second occlumency lesson in which he'd found himself treading through Snapes unfortunate thoughts and memories and had felt familiar sting. He had connected, in a very real way that noone else could understand (he was sure), to the despair and lonliness that permeated Snape's mind. And it had jarred him hard to see Gryffindors in group (three of four which he held in highest regard) bullying Snape as he sat alone all those years ago. Had jarred him so hard, infact, that he had been forced to question everything he believed about houses and about the people in them. The people who headed them. He had begun to get that Gryffindor way about it, too, defensive and angry on Snape's behalf until he had started sympathizing with the potion's master, had started feeling some breaking heart sentiments over his hard life and the way he had been treated (especially by Harry himself). Then he had admired the way Snaped walked. Had found himself watching the man in a new elegant (albeit tortured) light. And things had, as they do for fifteen year old boys, gotten _incredibly_ messy from there.

.

At any given moment, on any given day, with any given year potions was an awkward and uncomfortable class. For Harry, personally, it had been awkward when he had hated Snape and it continued to be awkward now that he rather fancied Snape - moreso because Snape kind of knew he was being fancied. For Snape, the same, only switched around.

.

He had never confessed it to anyone but Potions had always been Lily's favorite subject - Snape actually didnt think much of it, as subjects went, but had excelled in it every year because, frankly, it had given him something to talk to her about. Snape had wondered, that first year teaching Harry, if her son was going to carry the same penchant - he had supposed, actually, that Harry would be quite blown away by his Professor Snape. However. Harry had been starstruck by much of Hogwarts but not particularly by potions, not in the same way, say, transfiguration caught him (what was it about _bloody_ Minerva..) He had felt a kind of massive disappointment knowing he wasn't going to be one of Potter's great heroes but more, he was going to serve as his greatest nemesis. It may have even jolted him to see more of James staring up at him than Lily, in that first class. Strange, that. Walking down the aisle, watching hopeless fifth years turn their Draughts of Death into purple sludge, or worse (Crabbe) sizzling off their ties (pity), Snape leers down his less than perfect nose at Potter who has been giving off especially disinterested waves of energy. In that way that blotted youth does when it has been scorned or found out. Snape felt no great remorse about seeing Harry's dark, hidden fantasies although they had caused him a great deal of back-and-forth about being hated or not, afterall. Probably hated _more_, now. As he passes Harry looks up at him, then, in that choice moment and rolls those green eyes up to total, unwavering eye contact that unnerves Snape in a deep, deep way.

.

If there was some kind of magical god - god of magic, as it were - Harry would dissolve into the floor. He hated Snape knowing. He hated Snape thinking he knew. Whatever it was, well, it was alot more complicated than whatever Snape had stuck his greasy nose into for all of - oh - ten seconds in Harry's mind. It really, it was really very frustrating because Snape kept looking at him and then looking away - Snape had never wavered so that Harry kept trying to make firm eye contact, kept trying to say, without saying it, I'm not some nervous little boy, I am, _you know_, rather adultish. Whatever. He slumps his shoulders and gives some much needed attention to Hermione who has, thus, been carrying their project all class and looks a little suffered for it.

"D'ya need me to get anything, or?" he mumbles helplessly. Hermione gives him a look, then considers the cauldron, wanting desperatly, apparently, to make Harry do something. "Valeria root? From the cubbord?" as she begins stirring counterclockwise and counting to herself in whispers. Harry nods and throws his lanky legs into the aisle and pulls himself up to a begrudging stand and turns to walk toward the back cabinets and runs into one hard, hard body with an unf that causes the entire class to look in the direction of, well, Snape plastered with Potter all over the front of him like a bug on a muggle windshield. Harry puts a clean foot between them instantly, of course, in kind of a jumped panic that makes the Slytherins chuckle (and one of their attentions so caught that a potion cleanly errupts). Snape, to his credit, merely steps around Potter without a languish, drawn out reprimand or point deducting, without any of it that causes harry to go more sour faced than twenty points for clumsiness.

.

_Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is_.

.

It isn't that Snape has never looked at Harry and thought _thoughts_, but it wasn't his habit to look at underage students and _think thoughts_. There was a history with Potter that drew Snape in, though, that caused him to appreciate the nuances of the boys, ah, person. He was exceedingly mature in some ways, too (and less so in a great many more) and this year especially Snape had been more, well, Harry had done some growing up, hadn't he? In any event it isn't in Snape's character that he should actually be villainous with hands furling in balls over good-looking students and what he might do to them. Snape doesn't even really understand the notion of crushes and interests in that way, or not in any vein that pertains to others interested in him. He can't even imagine, honestly. _Honestly_. A boy like Potter laying in his bed in (bloody, insufferable) Gryffindor tower with a ratty old photo of Snape and his hands running down his stomach, into his pants, grasping.. _honestly_. But, then too, he can remember being Potter's age. He and Lily hiding in the tall grass by Hogwarts Lake during their fifth year, each day's twilite had been red and vibrant and memorable, perfectly memorable. Lily would flap her arms, so much like the birds who sought to soar above them, beyond, out to freedom - '_that's us one day, Severus, free'_. She would point overheard and follow the red-tip robins by fingetip, tracing their forms across the skyline in lazy loops that inevitably led down to Snape's nose and cheeks and, still, her laughter is in his ears from those days that she playfully colored the sky across his sweaty skin. He would capture her fingers and hold them tight until the bells rang for dinner and she pulled her hand loose with a guilty expression. '_You'll be free of it all one day, Severus, I promise'_.

.

"And I trust, Mr. Potter, that you will be punctual for your lesson this evening." Snape says to the flat of Harry's back as he exits last from the classroom. "And-" the word and hangs in the air, intangible and powerful in a way that makes Harry throw one sulky look over his shoulder. "And if you've things to hide - _pathetic, childish, misguided_ things - then I suggest you make use of defending your mind, as per the point of these lessons." And a smile, where smiling is only meant to cut and hurt.

Harry's eyes blaze the most brilliant emerald in response.


	3. Chapter 3

Harry had never spent an inordinate amount of time comptemplating sexuality (he had never spent an inordinate amount of time comtemplating _anything_, honestly). The wizarding world had a very different way of going about sexuality than the muggle world, namely that large aspects of romances were bonds between magic and soul and placed much less stock in gender, or even species. The delicate nuances of his own, well, _preferences_ had not really begun to sink in until this year - either because he was a generally late bloomer or because he had so much more pressure than the average fifteen year old that it could hardly all be documented in one sitting. He had liked Cho Chang, he'd thought, but his experience in kissing her had been a very different experience than those that came to him in his head in the restless, waning hours of night. Their kiss had been very passionless, very awkward - he had been more worried about where to put his hands and how to shift the weight on his feet than he had been about her lips and the way she had tasted (Hermione had, with hands on Harry's arms, tried to comfort him in Gryffindor tower, saying that no kiss could be romantic in that state, with her tears, with Cedric's lingering ghost between them). Harry had, at the time, shrugged and assumed she was right - she was right about everything if you gave it enough time. But he knew something was off, something about him just wasn't quite the same as oh, Ron, who was in so many words a walking hard-on and seemed expressive of the general frame of mind of every other boy their age. Harry just didn't ifeel/i that way. He may not have been particularly thoughtful but Harry knew what being different felt like - he had been different for eleven years in a cupboard under the stairs, afterall.

Snape. There was Snape, existing in that way things exist to be totally reviled and hated one day and adored and hoisted up on shoulders the next. Or there was the coming of age realization that things were not such a dowdry black and white, that his youth had been spent in a very one-dimensional place and this new place he was coming upon with maturity, self awareness and embarrassingly inopportune erections in potions, well, there were _alot_ of dimensions to it. He doesn't pretend that he understands, not fully, but people were born this way, weren't they? He imagines his feelings arent't any more abnormal than Ron's passing glances at Lavender Brown's legs (which Harry had _never_ got). There had never been a moment when Harry had started particularly noticing Snape - he had had a sense that Snape was set apart since the first time their eyes had met. In the following years it had transformed in nature but Severus Snape had always been a distinct part of Harry's world, and thoughts. Now he was the afterimage on Harry's eyelids before sleep.

Harry tosses off his sweater vest and tries to make a go of his hair, first combing it and then rifling it around with his fingers in despair at his state in the mirror. He was attracted to Snape. The idea terrifies and embarrasses him, while simultaneously making his heart speed up. He might have never come to terms with it if he hadn't seen the man's mind, seen the softness that existed somewhere, buried away, a secret. Related so strongly to those feelings which were, dominated by all else, a kind of fear. Snape, for all his bravado and show was terribly, terribly afraid. Harry blinks, realizing he had stopped fussing with his tie and his hands were frozen in the knots of striped silk. He had never known anyone to be as equally afraid of the future as he was.

Neville and Dean were both in the dormatory, gangly boy bodies slung over their respective beds as Harry smashed his hands flat against his hair, trying to undo the horrendous work he had done. Neville was lost in a large leatherbound edition of Herbs: remedies from the garden (with a subtitle that read: _soothe your nerves, cure your cough or colour your fabrics_) whilst Dean had a magazine spread out before him but was eyeing Harry wryly.

"Gotta date then, Harry?" he asks, finally, after long beats of watching him fidget in the mirror.

Harry doesn't respond - instead he turns, as if realizing other people were in the room, and considers the time as he yanks his shirttale to hang wrinkled out of his pants.

"Gotta go" he says, really to noone, balling and unballing his fists as he throws himself into the stairwell. 

**.**

**.**

Snape was not afraid. _Not afraid_ he echos to himself. By gods how many students had he sent sobbing out of the dungeons in his years (many), how many Deatheaters had he looked squarely in the face on a regular basis (quite a few), how many Darklords did he presently have _fooled_ (one). So tutoring one insufferable little prat like Potter, even if it was pointless because he was incapable of concentrating on one thing at a time, was nothing to feel shaken about.

His real problem was that the boy had a way of breaking through his defenses in a way that Snape was.. unaccustomed to. He was a skilled Occlumency master, maybe one of the best in the wizarding world and yet twice, _twice_ Potter had gotten through Snape's defenses, seen his most intimate moments. Nevermind that Legilimency took years of discipline, years for a witch or wizard to even understand how to interpret what they were seeing, to know how to navigate the layers of the subconscious, but Potter had, both times, targeted a precise kind of recollection from Snape - his vulnerabilities, his emotional memories - and they had sacrificed themselves to him willingly, as though they belonged to the boy. He had seen what love meant to the potion's master - desire right below the surface and friendship at the core. In Snape's mind Potter had lived he and Lily's childhood side by side, their lives illustrated together like bleeding watercolours in a pensieve. Lily bleeds into Snape at every fracture, she fills every break and hairline, her memory both cripples him to his knees and makes him an infinitely better man, just as her son has done for five years. _Just as her son has done for five years_. Snape is not a good person - he is not particularly magnanimous or noble but he rises to the occasion for what is beautiful to him, what is precious and worth protecting. He has always known he would die to protect Harry Potter but realizes, too, that it isn't just for Lily anymore.

Snape bristles at the thought of it, of the familiar light in Harry's magic that calls to his own, of the intimacy in a look between them - even when it was open loathing it was always passionate and demanded from both their full attention. Harry calls out of Snape a stubborn oath, a sallow heroism, a reluctant desire to do what is right for the sake of good things everywhere. Harry stands before him, a face from his dreams, a beating-blood echo of the past, incarnate of something that he may have not fully lost. Infinite possibilities.

_Okay_, there is some fear. It terrifies him how explicitly he is drawn to the boy, how easily Harry invades his mind. There are bonds in the wizarding world, things made of magic and will and essence that can not be forced or wished into existence. A deep melding; one that can not be iniated at will, or invoked by ritual. It happens in the way that every wizard most deeply appreciates: naturally, and with time, and only when it is truly right. Between two people who have connected so deeply in spirit that their minds open completely to one another. Alot like the way a wand will choose it's wielder, a heart chooses it's mate. Snape is an open book to Harry Potter, the boy need only look, and Snape hates that unexplained vulnerability - he hates having no control in the matter. If Harry exists as a second chance for Snape to realize love then he has quelled it with cut glances and short, dry sarcasms. It exists as an afterthought, hot-sweats at night when waking from dream (after dream) and the cold slap of water to wash it away, left to stare into a mirror and tell his inner voices _no_.

_I will not cross that line_.

Snape stares into the fireplace with the line repeating itself in his head, his thin fingers worrying the buttons of his jacket until there is a hesitant knock at his door and he turns his head, the amber and tangerine flames reflected in bottomless pools of black.


End file.
